Every locality in Maharashtra has a government-notified value per unit of land and per unit of built area. That value is the Ready Reckoner Rate. You will not negotiate it, you cannot argue with it at the registration counter, and it quietly decides the floor under your stamp duty even when the price you agreed is lower.
What the Ready Reckoner Rate is
The Ready Reckoner Rate is the minimum value notified by the state government for a property in a given locality, published in the Annual Statement of Rates. Other states call the same thing a circle rate or a guidance value; the mechanism is identical.
It is published by the Office of the Inspector General of Registration and Controller of Stamps, and it is granular. The Annual Statement of Rates does not give one figure for a district. It gives values by village, by zone within a town, by sub-zone within a village, and separately for open land, for built residential space, for shops and for offices, with guidelines that adjust the base figure for factors such as the width of the abutting road or the age of a structure.
The point of it is administrative rather than economic. It exists so that duty can be assessed consistently, without the registration office having to form a view on what any individual plot is worth.
Who publishes it, and when it changes
The Annual Statement of Rates is revised on an annual cycle and takes effect on 1 April, the start of the financial year. In practice the revision is announced in the last days of March, which gives buyers very little notice.
That timing has a real consequence. A transaction registered on 31 March is assessed on the old schedule; the same transaction registered on 1 April is assessed on the new one. In a year of increases, that is a date worth knowing about.
The 2026-27 freeze
There is no increase for FY 2026-27. Rates were held at 2025-26 levels with effect from 1 April 2026.
The decision was announced on 31 March 2026 by the Office of the Inspector General of Registration and Controller of Stamps, on the Chief Minister's direction, and finalised by Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule. One caution on sourcing: this is drawn from news reporting, and the underlying order from the Inspector General of Registration was not retrievable online. Ask the Sub-Registrar to confirm which year's schedule is being applied to your instrument.
What the current rates actually are, and where they came from
Because 2026-27 is a freeze, the rates in force today are the ones set in the FY 2025-26 revision. That revision was not uniform. Increases ranged from 3.36% in rural areas to 5.95% in municipal corporation areas, with a statewide average widely reported as 3.9%.
The spread is the interesting part. A rural parcel and a plot inside a municipal corporation did not move by the same amount, and a taluka with both kinds of land inside it will show both patterns. If somebody tells you "reckoner rates went up about 4% last year", they are quoting the statewide average, not the number that applied to any particular village.
How the higher-of rule works, with an illustration
Stamp duty is charged at 5% on the higher of the agreement value or the Ready Reckoner value. The registration fee follows the same value, at 1% capped at ₹30,000.
The 5% is the real rate. The plot values and Ready Reckoner values in the table are illustrative round numbers, chosen because they are easy to multiply. No Annual Statement of Rates figure for Khalapur is published in a form this page can quote, so read the columns as arithmetic and not as a guide to what land there is assessed at.
| Scenario | Agreement value, illustrative | Ready Reckoner value, illustrative | Value duty is charged on | Stamp duty at 5% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price above notified value | ₹60,00,000 | ₹50,00,000 | ₹60,00,000 | ₹3,00,000 |
| Price below notified value | ₹40,00,000 | ₹50,00,000 | ₹50,00,000 | ₹2,50,000 |
| Price equal to notified value | ₹50,00,000 | ₹50,00,000 | ₹50,00,000 | ₹2,50,000 |
Look at the middle row. The buyer has agreed ₹40 lakh, but duty is assessed on ₹50 lakh, because the notified value is higher. That is ₹2,50,000 of duty on a ₹40 lakh purchase, where the price alone would have suggested ₹2,00,000. The registration fee behaves differently again: 1% of ₹50,00,000 is ₹50,000, but the fee is capped at ₹30,000, so the cap bites and the buyer pays ₹30,000.
The Ready Reckoner sets a floor, never a ceiling. It can only ever raise the value on which you are assessed, and it does so silently, without anyone renegotiating your price.
What happens when the agreement value is below the notified value
Nothing dramatic happens at the counter. Duty is simply computed on the higher figure and the document is registered.
What you should notice is that a gap has appeared between the price recorded in your instrument and the value the state has assessed. That gap is visible to anyone who reads the file afterwards, and it is the kind of thing that gets examined when the transaction is later scrutinised, whether by a lender, a buyer's advocate on resale, or a tax authority looking at the difference between consideration and notified value.
If you genuinely bought below the notified value, keep the evidence of why. A plot with a disputed boundary, an access problem or a pending litigation can be worth less than the schedule says. The document trail explaining that is worth building at the time, not reconstructing five years later.
What the Ready Reckoner is not
It is not a valuation of your plot. The Annual Statement of Rates is a schedule of minimum values for a locality, not an opinion on a specific parcel, and it takes no account of the things that actually move land prices: frontage, level, approach road condition, view, encumbrance, or whether the layout has sanctioned infrastructure.
It is not a market price either, in either direction. In a slow locality the notified value can sit above what anyone will pay. In a fast one it can lag badly behind. Using it as a proxy for what land is worth is a mistake in both cases.
And it is not a substitute for a zone certificate. A high notified value does not mean the land may be built on.
Finding the rate for a specific plot near Khopoli
The authoritative source is igrmaharashtra.gov.in, the portal of the Inspector General of Registration, which publishes the Annual Statement of Rates along with the year's valuation guidelines.
Be honest about the difficulty. We were not able to obtain village-level or taluka-level Annual Statement of Rates land values for Khalapur, Karjat or Alibag in a form we could publish with confidence, which is why no rupee figure for those talukas appears anywhere on this page. The schedule has to be read manually, for the correct year, for the correct village, and for the correct sub-zone within that village. Any website quoting you a single Khopoli reckoner rate has almost certainly flattened all of that.
Raigad contains both municipal-council and gram-panchayat pockets, so confirm the notified value and the duty rate for your specific survey number with the Sub-Registrar before you transact.
What to check before you sign
- Which financial year's Annual Statement of Rates will apply to your instrument, given your likely registration date.
- The notified value for the exact survey or gat number, read off the schedule rather than quoted from memory.
- Which sub-zone within the village the plot falls in, and the guideline adjustments applied to reach the final figure.
- Whether the plot is assessed as open land or as developed land, and why.
- Whether your agreement value sits above or below that figure, and what the assessed duty therefore is.
- The registration fee computation, and whether the ₹30,000 cap has been reached.
- A printout or screenshot of the schedule entry, kept with your file.